IBM voted against the certification of Microsoft Office document formats as an international standard at a general assembly of Ecma International on Thursday.

Microsoft submitted the document formats, called Office Open XML , to Ecma last year for standardization. On Thursday, the standards organization voted on whether to certify the specifications as Ecma standards and whether to submit them to ISO for consideration as ISO standards.

The vote was expected to pass. However, IBM representatives vote against the submission, said Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of standards and open source .

"It is an example of a real open standard versus a vendor-dictated spec that documents proprietary products via XML. ODF is about the future, Open XML is about the past. We voted for the future," Sutor wrote in his blog.

University of Texas researchers have found a new species and family of catfish that are the last members of a group of fish that may have lived during the dinosaur area.

The species is called Lacantunia enigmatica while the entire family will be called Lacantuniidae. The fish live in the Chiapas region of Mexico. The Lacantuniidae is the 37th species of living catfish.

"To most people it's just a catfish, and externally it looks a lot like an ictalurid, the family to which all North American freshwater catfishes belong," said Dean Hendrickson, one of the discoverers, said in a prepared statement. "But once we got into the skeleton, we started seeing all these weird things."

The catfish are somewhat rare. The researchers collected just one specimen in a recent five-day expedition.

Finding new families of living vertebrates is rare. In ichthyology, only two new families have been discovered in the past 60 years: the coelacanth in 1938 and the megamouth shark in 1983.

Researchers studying botnets have reported an increase in attacks on Georgian Web sites, including that of the country's president, within the last two weeks. While the attacks--Web site defacement and denial-of-service packet floods--are reminiscent of the Internet attacks waged against Estonia in May 2007 , Jose Nazario, security researcher for Arbor Networks, told CNET News
that he's seeing evidence that Georgia is apparently fighting back, attacking at least one Moscow-based newspaper site.

As to the source, Nazario said that "almost all of the attacks are broadly and globally sourced. One attack appears to be very narrowly focused, possibly someone with some basic ping flood scripts." He said the exact tools being used had not been determined.

In a presentation at July's Usenix conference in San Jose , Calif., Nazario said Internet wars make for a "great, level playing field" because they're inexpensive to mount.

He also pointed out that Internet-based wars did not start last year with Estonia. He cited previous attacks on Kosovo, during its civil war in the late 1990s; Israel-Pakistan hacking peaked in the fall of 2000; and the 2002 winter Olympics, when a South Korean speed skater was ejected from a competition.

More recently, he said, there were attacks on the Ukraine in the fall of 2007; Chinese national attacks on CNN.com in April 2008; and attacks upon the Democratic voice of Burma in July. In July hundreds of Web sites were attacked in Lithuania .

Internet wars do make for plausible deniability; we may never know who's ultimately responsible for these attacks.In each of these cases, Nazario said, "I can't go and talk to these people, so I have to infer what their intent was."

Attempts to power hybrid cars with solar panels have been around for a few years. But now a company called Solar Electrical Vehicles is producing commercially available after-market panels for hybrids, starting with the Toyota Prius.

Get the sun to juice your hybrid car.

The fiberglass, molded panels fit on top of 2004-2007 Prius models. They are attached using an epoxy glue. Unlike previous attempts , these panels fit the curve of the roof.

To maximize your sun power and driving range, you need a larger battery installed than what comes standard with the Prius, according to company founder Greg Johanson, who says that battery storage is the most challenging aspect for solar-powered cars.

In terms of distance, the panels will get you up to 20 miles a day, depending on the size of the battery. They can improve fuel efficiency by up to 29 percent. The standard-equipped Prius battery, recharged by the sun, will take you about two miles at under 35 miles per hour.

Johansen said that because of tax credits, getting a 1 kilowatt solar electrical system on your home to charge your car can make better financial sense than getting a solar roof on your car. But that doesn't taking into account the cool factor.

"It is way cooler driving down the freeway and have people pulling up alongside and giving you a big thumbs up. It's hope for the future," he says.

Next up on their production plans is the hybrid Toyota Highlander and other SUVs .

Owen Van Natta, Facebook's chief revenue officer and vice president of operations, has announced his departure from the social network.

Van Natta told All Things D's Kara Swisher in an interview on Tuesday that he plans to seek a CEO position at another company--the identity of which he's not sure of yet. At Facebook, Van Natta had been chief operating officer until an executive reshuffling last summer placed him into his present role. He had been at Facebook since September 2005, long before its meteoric rise in popularity last year.

This is a likely indicator that Facebook's founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, just shy of his 24th birthday, will not step aside anytime soon as some critics have suggested . The 38-year-old Van Natta had been one of the most visible "adults" on Facebook's young team, having been Amazon.com's vice president of worldwide business and corporate development after founding its A9.com search site, and was likely looking to take the helm at the Palo Alto, Calif.-based site.

Facebook released a statement to the press on Tuesday: "Over the next few weeks, Owen Van Natta will be transitioning out of his role at Facebook to pursue other opportunities," the comment read. "As Chief Revenue Officer and previously Chief Operating Officer, he has been instrumental in building out the core infrastructure of the company and has been key to building Facebook's Microsoft relationship. He also recruited some great executives in sales and business development and has been an influential part of the management team. The company is very grateful for the contributions Owen has made to Facebook and looks forward to working with him again in the future."

Additionally, the statement continued, there will be an ongoing executive restructuring. "We will be actively adding key people across the company in the coming weeks and months. Facebook is also naming Matt Cohler, previously Vice President of Strategy and Operations, to Vice President of Product Management. Matt will be responsible for overseeing product development and working closely with the engineering organization at Facebook."

It's been an interesting week for America's second-largest cell phone carrier. First, Verizon Wireless announces it would support unlocked handsets and third-party applications on its CDMA network, and yesterday the company's CEO said the carrier may support Google's new Android platform . "We're planning on using Android," said Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam in an interview with Business Week . "Android is an enabler of what we do."

McAdam didn't say when, or if, Verizon would release handsets that use Android, and a Verizon spokeswoman also declined to elaborate in an e-mail. "We certainly
expect some in the development community to embrace the Android
platform in the open-access devices and applications they develop," wrote Nancy Stark, the spokeswoman. "We have not yet decided whether we will use Android in any of the devices Verizon Wireless offers." Stark added that the company has yet to decide whether it will join the Google's Open Handset Alliance , which is developing the Android platform. Though Sprint and T-Mobile are founding members of the OHA, neither carrier has confirmed when they will release Android devices.

Both announcements mark a distinct change in Verizon's practices. The company has a long-standing reputation in the cell phone world for being the most draconian of carriers. Not only did it prohibit the use of unlocked phones on its network, but also it limited Bluetooth use, banned third-party applications, and saddled its handset lineup with an unintuitive and stodgy menu interface.

Again with the Internet slip-ups , only this time the company itself is to blame. This morning, a new Sony MP3/video player sneaked onto SonyStyle briefly. As anyone who listened to my podcast rant about broken NDAs might infer, this tidbit was not welcome news first thing in the morning. I'd been sitting on the Sony NWZ-A815 info for a while, and I kept my mouth shut, even when a blurry rumor blog posted about it yesterday . But--I'm sorry--when the company itself cannot keep its own secrets, that's just too much to bear. In agreement with our contact, who wants to ensure that you get the most accurate information possible, here are all the official details:

The NWZ-A810 series comes in a variety of flavors: The NWZ-A815 player has a total capacity of 2GB; comes in white, pink, black, and silver; and will cost about $140. Then, there's the $180 NWZ-A816, which has 4GB and comes in white, pink, black, and silver. The 8GB NWZ-A818 will be available in only black or silver and will cost about $230.
Great news! Sony has given up the ghost on SonicStage. This player is an MTP/PlaysForSure device with all the trimmings: MP3/WMA/AAC support, including playback of subscription tracks downloaded from the likes of Rhapsody.
This Walkman video player has a 2-inch QVGA LCD screen capable of playing MPEG 4 and M4V profile at 30 frames per second.
As per usual, battery life is astounding: as long as 33 hours of audio playback and up to 8 hours for video.
This series of players comes with higher-quality Sony earbuds , and it offers a variety of sound enhancement features: Digital Sound Enhancement Engine, Clear Bass, and Clear Stereo.
There's also a bidirectional LCD, meaning you can view photos or videos either vertically or in landscape mode .

The Sony NWZ-A810 series of MP3 players is expected to start shipping at the end of this month.